Spars and fights
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I did TKD for a number of years and also picked up on some Kendo years ago, when I was younger and had a body that wasn't partially broken down. For the amount I was taught, there is the ability to be really technical in poses during a fight scene. I've written them just to see what it would look like, and to me, it reads real boring. Now that could be me, but I'm not sure the need to include, 'by rotating his wrist and forearm halfway clockwise, he was able to pull at the opponent's elbow, pulling down, which offset the other's center of balance....blah blah blah'.
Personally, I think it's just better(and easier)if the majority of the details are glossed over. But then again, I like it when most fight scenes are a recreation of They Live between Roddy Piper and Keith David.
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To me one of the basic parts of building up chemistry while roleplaying fights is to be on the same wave length with the other person(s?) about the style. I don't mean posing style or the verbiage involved, just... the general spirit of it.
For example a fight can be cinematic, full of backflips, walk-walking, heroic poses and such. It can also be more of a conversational piece full of banter, multi-sentence dialogue, taunting and generally stuff that ignores the physical vigor using it as a backdrop for other things. It can be also be hardcore super realistic (or at least what passes for that on MU*) with energy conservation being a primary concern, participants keeping track of how fatigue or minor injuries affect the spar going forward, etc.
Aside from the outcome, using dice or not... aside from all that, I think it's important everyone agrees beforehand how it's going to be, because mixing those things usually won't work well.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said in Spars and fights:
Aside from the outcome, using dice or not... aside from all that, I think it's important everyone agrees beforehand how it's going to be, because mixing those things usually won't work well.
I know this is kind of bad and communication is important and all that, but having to do this takes a lot of the magic out of it for me.
I really enjoy spontaneity in my RP, regardless of whether we're talking about a casual social, a fight, etc. I don't want to plan the fine points of every scene ahead.
Some basic things like, 'How do you want to do this? Dice-rolls, freestyle? ...' Sure, fine. And I will of course temperature-check if I'm worried about my RP partner's comfort, I don't want them to think that I OOCly hate them just because my character does, and I don't want to spring graphic gore on the squeamish.
But if I need to discuss my expectations of banter and pacing beforehand? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I'd rather do that very casually in a shared OOC setting like this one, or an in-game lounge/channel. I can't be the only one who, when starting a scene, prefers for there to be as little OOC chit-chat and background-noise as possible to get things rolling organically.
I also do not honestly mind if someone has a different RP/writing style than me. I appreciate differences; they offer an opportunity to potentially be inspired and reevaluate my own preferences.
While I have my own opinions on what makes an epic fight scene, my day isn't ruined just because someone did or didn't pronate their wrist.
I'm a pretty agreeable person though and generally quite happy to go with the flow of whatever the other person wants. I don't care if you want dice-rolls or not. I prefer freestyle but it's nbd for me to adapt when in Rome. So perhaps my preference for minimal pre-talk has a lot to do with the fact that it's all just the same to me, but then I also think I'd have more fun RPing with someone who has a similar Yes-And, flexy improvisational attitude, and not someone who feels the need to dictate an excess of rules and regs beforehand. That all just makes me feel a little bit claustrophobic.
These questions are fun to think about in a less consequential context, but when it comes to go-time my real main preference is that neither of us takes things too seriously.
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@Kestrel said in Spars and fights:
@Arkandel said in Spars and fights:
Aside from the outcome, using dice or not... aside from all that, I think it's important everyone agrees beforehand how it's going to be, because mixing those things usually won't work well.
I know this is kind of bad and communication is important and all that, but having to do this takes a lot of the magic out of it for me.
I don't know that it's as critical to work out beforehand as @Arkandel mentioned, but I do think it's critical to be on the same wavelength. If one person is posing flipping around and bouncing off walls and waving a zweihander around like a toothpick and the other person is getting into how much their legs ache from having to duck so many sweeping blows and how their sweat is stinging their eyes -- there's going to be a whole lot of cognitive dissonance.
What I think is most important -- and what makes the best fight scenes -- is finding the style that works for the two of you, something you can both share, and really enjoying that. If you find your character talking more and more in response to your opponent's snappy comebacks, and you know that next time you're going to get them with a real zinger and you're excited about that, that's great. If you know that you'll get to enjoy some gritty, sweaty, achy sparring and next time you can't wait to collapse against each other afterwards and you're excited about that, that's great.
I think it's the sort of chemistry that can grow organically through the scene, and as long as the initial styles aren't too far off one another, I think that's the best way for it to happen. If, on the other hand, your styles are way off one another, that might be a time to sit down and chat OOCly, or to discuss expectations before your next spar.
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@Kestrel said in Spars and fights:
I know this is kind of bad and communication is important and all that, but having to do this takes a lot of the magic out of it for me.
Communication doesn't need to be explicit. I agree that sitting down to work a bunch of things in advance can spoil the moment versus simply... playing.
However having played with someone already gives you a pretty good idea of what they're like, for example. Either way you (generic you) can also read your partner's poses, see what they seem to be aiming for and adjust on the fly - in fact this is the default, in my experience.
All that said I don't know if it's just nostalgia but I haven't seen the spirit of 'emote fighting' recreated in another MUSH since. The actual implementation was pretty flawed (and that's partly on me, as I had a big say in it) but the status the practice itself carried as a mini game of sorts was quite fun.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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I think it takes a lot of time and skill to emote fighting without discussing it beforehand.
I have done it before. I do not know how the other player found it. Part of it is remembering to be responsive. What is the other person writing? What is their aim? Frankly, the better the partner, the better the experience at this level.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede The caveat here is that my memory is painted by nostalgia but I think the difference maker is culture; when you have a critical mass of players whose expectations, understanding and goals for emote fighting is similar then others joining in can learn organically as well.
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@Arkandel said in Spars and fights:
Let me ask a different question for the thread.
Is 'knowing how to fight iRL' - having some kind of background in martial arts, or even just watching MMA stuff on TV - an advantage to roleplaying such scenes?
I fenced in high school, and I've found this a bit of both yes & no on related games. I think it can definitely help your own posing. Having an idea about some of the elements aside from 'hit other guy' (footwork is important!) provides, well, ideas. That can't really hurt. I definitely enjoyed RPing some of those scenes and was confident of my pose quality, though most of the places I did had rules or code backing things up so it was mostly color/flavor on top. The knowledge can actually be very handy there for 'huh, the dice say this, how could that occur?' and actually working out some plausible narrative counterpart.
For the other person, it's kind of a wash. Regardless of your knowledge, you can't assume they're going to share it, or acknowledge yours. They might pose 'mistakes,' but not agree that they are, or the dice might go the other way, etc. So again, it's far more handy for elaborating on the results you get than trying to really 'apply' the knowledge.
I also think knowing stage fighting / choreography is probably even better than knowing anything more athletic or realistic, since cinematic fights are often unrealistic and people probably want to emulate that. This touches on the class of styles above, but I think even the 'grittiest' game is still going to be closer to (serious) movie fighting than anything remotely realistic.
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@Ganymede Last time I did that with you, Count got his taint punched... just saying.
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I generally don't really have a problem making combats both fun and technically light.
Look, you really want to write these things like fight scenes in a book. As much as people like @Kestrel might love all the little technical aspects of the fight, to most of us, getting too bogged down in the weeds is just boring. And I even have a background in martial arts.
Worse, it looks a bit pretentious and makes it seem like you're trying to grandstand if you get too weedsy with how things are going down.
You sort of have to find a good middle ground, and a good way to show the back and forth. Give enough detail to show what's going on, but not so much that you lose the audience in the finer points of kinetics. You don't necessarily have to agree on how it all goes down beforehand, either, so long as you both are halfway decent at reading the other.
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@Wretched said in Spars and fights:
@Ganymede Last time I did that with you, Count got his taint punched... just saying.
That sounds like a magnificent scene, lol.
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It's kind of like TS, really. It helps if you can keep track of where your body parts are at any given time, but the nitty gritty of what your pronated hands are doing is not as interesting as what it reveals about your character and how your character reacts to things. Sometimes details matter and are fun to pose out, often it's more a matter of describing your character's mood and overall f*****ng style.
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@peasoupling I think there's a joke here about TS and hand pronation.
I'm not going to make that joke.
